Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman is a 2007 Japanese horror film directed by Kōji Shiraishi and written by Shiraishi and Naoyuki Yokota. Based on the Japanese urban legend known as Kuchisake-onna, or "the Slit-Mouthed Woman", the film stars Eriko Sato as Kyōko Yamashita, a divorced mother and teacher who attempts to solve a series of child abduction cases with the help of her co-worker Noboru Matsuzaki, played by Haruhiko Kato.
The film was followed by a prequel, Carved 2: The Scissors Massacre, in 2008.
Plot[]
As stories about Kuchisake-onna ("The Slit-Mouthed Woman") spread through a Japanese town, an earthquake causes a corpse matching the entity's description to break out of a closet in an abandoned house. As this occurs, Noboru Matsuzaki, an elementary school teacher, hears a voice ask, "Am I pretty?" At a playground, a boy who had gone looking for Kuchisake-onna with his friends is grabbed by the entity.
The boy's disappearance prompts the school where Noboru works to send students home in groups, escorted by staff members. Mika Sasaki is reluctant to go home, admitting to a teacher, Kyōko, that her mother hits her. Kyōko has a troubled relationship with her own daughter, who lives with her ex-husband, and becomes agitated when Mika says she hates her mother, causing Mika to run away. Mika encounters Kuchisake-onna, whose appearance was again foreshadowed by Noboru hearing her voice. As Kuchisake-onna leaves with Mika, Mika knocks her mask off, revealing the woman's disfigured face.
At school, Noboru shows Kyōko a thirty-year-old photograph of a woman who looks like Kuchisake-onna. Noboru hears the voice again and traces it to a house, and he and Kyōko save a boy from Kuchisake-onna, whom Kyōko seemingly kills with a knife. Kuchisake-onna's body turns into that of a housewife, revealing that the spirit acts by possessing other women, whose possession is signified by them developing a cough.
Noboru tells Kyōko that the woman in the photo is Taeko Matsuzaki, his deceased mother, a sickly and unhinged woman who would physically abuse him and his siblings. One day, Taeko "disappeared" after killing Noboru's siblings, and after that, rumors and sightings of Kuchisake-onna began. Kuchisake-onna has now possessed the mother of Mika's friend, Natsuki. Natsuki is taken to Kuchisake-onna's lair, where the spirit cuts her mouth and murders the boy she had abducted from the playground. Mika saves Natsuki but she is traumatized and injured.
Kyōko looks through information on Kuchisake-onna and finds a note stating that the ghost's hideout is a deserted house with a red roof, a description that matches Noboru's childhood home. Noboru remembers that his mother tried to have him mercy kill her, telling him that if he did not, she would come back and haunt others. Instead, Noboru slit his mother's mouth and stabbed her, then dressed her body up in a coat and mask, and hid it in the closet.
Kyōko and Noboru find Mika in the house's basement, and are attacked by Kuchisake-onna. Kuchisake-onna captures Noboru and Mika and brutalizes them. Kyōko stabs the spirit in the neck, killing and leaving behind the body of Natsuki's mother. Mika's mother becomes the new host. Noboru fends off the spirit but is fatally wounded. Before dying, he beheads her, convinced that doing so will finally vanquish her. The decapitation fails to stop Kuchisake-onna, as the only way to defeat Kuchisake-onna is to obliterate Taeko's corpse in the closet, and the spirit takes over Kyōko while she is visiting her daughter.